Every couple weeks, a guest finishes his round, enjoys a cold one, pulls me aside, and says he knows how to make it more fun. Funny, no one shooting 120 murmurs what I ‘m about to say.
If Golf Course Owner Guy had a dollar for every time I heard they tell me: I need more fairway bunkers, I should push a green site closer to a pond, I should narrow up the fairways, or I should add bunkers to the front of the greens. Interesting…their opinion of “better” always means it must be harder, you must lose more balls, and you must mark down a bad score if you don’t execute perfectly.
Why is his “make it more fun” never explained as: you should make the fairways wider, you should shallow the bunkers, fill in some of the ponds, or move some tees forward. If I make a tweak the course so you can’t break 100, have I made it better? According to my guest armchair architects, that is their definition of better.
Make It More Fun According to Who?
I don’t share that sentiment. Too many people have made golf courses too hard. My goal would be to make the courses more fun. Sure there was a time 20 years ago, when spectacular looking, and painfully unplayable was how golf courses were designed. I think Pete Dye once said “Golf was not meant to be fair”. Unconsciously you make decisions about where you would like to play each week based on the FUN factor. Some of you might find RSPGL more fun than others. I can deal with it. It’s the course I bought, not the course I designed. I’m making the best of it. And lucky for you, I’m not taking suggestions for how to make the course better.
